The Man Boobz Survey Results are in!

So the Man Boobz survey results are in, and Argenti Aertheri, who ran the survey, has taken the time and effort to make an impressive set of interactive charts to display the data in all of its gory details. You can find that chart below — thanks again, Argenti! — but I thought I’d highlight a few of the results first.

Let’s start with the white elephant in the room. I know I’ve made some somewhat rude remarks in the past about the high percentage of white people in the Men’s Rights subreddit.

Well, it turns out that the Man Boobz readership is even whiter than that. Yep. Using the same somewhat limited set of choices used by the dude who did the Men’s Rights subreddit survey, the MB survey found that the readership of this blog is nearly 92% white, and less than 2% each Asian, Hispanic and Black, with the remainder answering “Other.”

There is also a more complicated breakdown of ethnicities, based on a more nuanced set of questions, that I’m not even going to try to summarize; you can look through the charts yourself.

But, basically, yeah, this blog’s readership, like me, is pretty darn white. I take these results as an indication that I need to do a better job dealing with issues of race and racism. While this blog is primarily about misogyny, there is plenty of racism in the manosphere — from the white-supremacism-lite of Heartiste to the fetishization of Asian women as submissive — and it’s worth pointing this out on a more regular basis, as well as addressing some of the more subtle ways misogyny intersects with other forms of oppression. As well as the ways in which the standard (non) issues of the Men’s Rights movement can actually serve to obscure the very real issues faced by men of color. (See yesterday’s post for a perfect example of that.)

So what are some of the other notable results?

You’re all younger than me. Well, not literally ALL of you. In fact, there are a whole 4% of you older than me.

But the fact is that if you’re reading this, the chances are really, really, really good that you’re in your twenties or early thirties. Still, I feel fairly confident in saying that eventually you will be as old as I am now.

Also, it’s pretty likely that you’re a lady. Most of the readers of the blog — 59% — are cis women, with 30% cis men. The remaining 11 percent are made up of trans* women (2.2%), trans* men (0.9%), intersex (o.2%), “non-binary” (5.2%) and “other” (2.5%).

See the interactive charts below for a much more detailed breakdown of the data on gender and sexuality.

We’re a bunch of pinkos.More Man Boobzers identified themselves with Democratic Socialism than with any other political label. The second and third place winners in this category? “Other US Liberalism” and “Social Democratism.”

The sun never sets on the Man Boobz empire. Predictably, most Man Boobz readers — roughly 58% — live in the United States. And there are lots of Man Boobzers in other English-speaking countries around the world, particularly the UK, Canada, and Australia.

But Man Boobz attracts readers in a lot of places where English speakers are in a minority. I was a little surprised to find that there are twice as many Boobzers in Germany, for example, than in New Zealand, and that there are nearly as many in Iceland as in Ireland. There are readers in countries ranging from Argentina to El Salvador, from Jordan to Japan.

There are all sorts of other intriguing factoids to be found in the survey results, from a rather complicated slicing-and-dicing of religious beliefs to answers to the critical question: how many of you are actually me?

If you don’t have Flash, go here to see the charts in all their glory. See here for the footnotes and survey questions and raw data.

If you’re not a regular commenter here, this will help you to make sense of some of the silly in-jokes at the end of the survey.

One last note: The survey doesn’t tell us what percentage of Man Boobz readers consider themselves feminists or, ick, Men’s Rightsers. I’m going to do a quick followup survey on that in an upcoming post.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About David Futrelle

I run the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, which tracks (and mocks) online misogyny.
My writing has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Salon, Time.com, the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review and Money magazine.
I like cats.

“But Man Boobz attracts readers in a lot of places where English speakers are in a minority. I was a little surprised to find that there are twice as many Boobzers in Germany, for example, than in New Zealand, and that there are nearly as many in Iceland as in Ireland. There are readers in countries ranging from Argentina to El Salvador, from Jordan to Japan.”

I’m not surprised that there are twice as many Boobzers in Germany than in New Zealand – NZ has a population of only about 4.5 million! :-)

I’m also one of the germans. Not sure if my fellow germans keep lurking for the same reason, but personally I’m just afraid I mess up and say weird things, because I’m not a native English speaker. Despite that I’ve been reading this Blog for about two years now. ^^
All young germans have to take english classes at school though, only the elder do not speak a word of it at all. I think? I’m not completely sure about it, as I mostly went to school in the Netherlands before moving back to Germany and there we have to deal with even more languages. Which makes sense when you’re a tiny country depending on trading with your neighbours (mostly services by now, but still). No one is going to learn your language to communicate with you.

Of course I did not mean that there aren’t eldery folks that speak english, just that the “everyone has to take english classes” was not in place when they were young, so some people (like my grandparents and to a lesser extend my parents too, though there were a bit more english media around then, I guess) were not exposed to english much when they were young and just never really got the chance to learn it. And maybe never saw the necessity.

I think the internet plays a major role in why english is nowadays not only important to international bussinesspeople and linguists here in germany, but for ‘ordinary’ people too (as in people who don’t need english for their jobs). A big part of the internet and all the information out there is in english.

Back at college in the netherlands for example we almost only used the english wikipedia, because (again) the dutch speaking population in the world is just so small, that the articles on the dutch wiki are on average much shorter and less informative.

katzentier — I understood what you meant about older people being less likely to know English. My grandmother was a first generation American, her older brother was born in Italy, their mother never learned English. I imagine most of us understood what you meant, in part because you’re probably right about the internet making all of us more aware of the spread of English — non-native speakers being stuck learning it, and native speakers learning to be patient with non-native speakers.

And seriously, I doubt anyone could rival NWO for the title of “least understandable sentence”, and, afaik, he’s a native speaker. You see the Big Book of Learnin’ yet? It’s in the welcome package if not (last link in the post)

Yes, and I was already lurking in the comments when NWO spouted his particular versions of wisdom. So I’ve seen it in the making. :D

But I don’t know, It’s not so much that I’m afraid the commentariat here will get mad at me, I mean, I have read the commentsection for ages, I think I know pretty well what kind of thing pisses the people here off and I don’t intend to troll or be willfull obtuse (though I doubt I have succesfully combated all my biases already (and ever will), but Manboobz has been a great help in that regard, and I’m trying), and I know people here are quick to forgive If one is sorry and understands what was done wrong.

I just don’t think I can express the things I want to say exactly so that they come out the way I mean them. Not in the same way I can articulate myself in german (or dutch, even though my dutch is getting rusty). And then I tend to think, maybe I should just not say anything at all, because other people here can say the same things so much better.

But yes, I guess there have been (seemingly) native speakers here, that do much, much worse than me, not just NWO. xD

He was a real “interesting” one huh? And so what if you say a similar thing to someone else? The comment threads here are populated by ninjas it seems. Everybody either has someone say the same thing while they’re toying, or does it to someone else. Did you see my utter failure to get my point across last night? (Hm, might’ve been this morning for you)

It happens, and I, for one, am always pleased by different perspectives on the same concept. You learn more that way :)

But now I have to get through this family party with the more bigoted part of the family. So far they didn’t really say offensive stuff, except for my granddad insulting unfeminine women, but politics did not come up yet. I hope for the best…

Can I vent a little? Because of course certain topics had to come up sooner or later. Feel free to skip this. ^^”

So after granddad insulting some nurses as “Mannsweiber” (I can’t find a translation for this? Butch women sounds too harmless/not insulting enough for what he meant), another relative felt the need to repeatedly tell me that it’s a shame I scrutinize my “intelectual and refined” appearance with the possession of a pierced tongue, then the uncle who hates Russians (because they’re communists and communists hate christianity and therefore they are evil) went on a libertarian rant (but at least left out the “atheism is pure evil” bit this time), then there was the recurring topic of “boys are totally inherently interested in cars, always, and girls ALWAYS in changing their dress three times a day and are spending an hour in the bathroom, and that’s biology”, after that there was a long discussion on why social services are bad, and that everyone just should make their own money already and not depend on living off our taxes (leeches! lazy bitches!), and also people on welfare are mostly evil foreigners. And the government is bad too, because they are incompetent, and the private sector would do better.

There was some nice conversation too and it has been worse in the past, but I just wish they would stop spouting bigoted crap already. :/
They are sexist, racist and so on, and we’re a seriously privileged family, no worries, white and mostly upper-middleclass, everyone owns at least one house, has a secure job or even owns a stable business, so what the hell, STOP HATING ON POOR PEOPLE, you do NOT know what it is like, and shame on you.

Ugh. >_<

My 97 year old grandgrandmother gave out unsolicited romantic advice to me again, but that was at least sort of cute. (she did this already when I was 14, advising me and a friend to always remind boys that they "had to leave the church before the singing begins".)

Thank you. Kitties are nice too! Though I’ve become more of a rodentperson by now (that’s partly because I currently can’t have kitties, and partly because rats are lovely and awesome).

I think I’ll just watch the videos of my ratties now, that’ll cheer me up. I’d rather play with them, but to bring them when I visit my Dad wouldn’t be fair to them, so the boyfriend is ratsitting, and I have neither rats nor boyfriend to cuddle. :(

[blockquote] Biology’s an amazing thing, isn’t it? Wonder what boys were inherently interested in before cars were invented? [/blockquote]

I wonder about that too. Probably they were inventing other stuff or taming animals, for example to make horses do what they want (this is sort of technology too?) and build carriages or something.

I saw a (german) article lately complaining that horse riding has become a girl sport and all about caring for the cutie animals instead (because teenage girls need to channel their romantic feelings and care-instinct into something, also they will quickly lose interest in horses after their teens) of being competitive and about using the horse to get achievements, and therefore boys are not interested in it anymore and we need to change the cuddly additude towards horses to include boys again (read: turn it back into a male space).

I think there was something in it about upper-class women having too much time on their hands in the past and therefor being able to hijack horse breeding and stuff. Thus it became feminine and thus men do want nothing to do with it anymore. Because girl-cooties.

Blockquotes are the pointy arrows instead of the square ones; but when you do get ’em, the blockquote monster will be waiting. ;)

That thing about making horseriding all about TEH COMPETITION was awful in so many ways. Gender essentialism plus other bullshit mixed together. I won’t bother detailing the gender crap because duh, we all know it, but the “animals are just machines to use for competition and there’s something wrong about caring for them” subtext fills me with rage.

On the technology biology – heh, Louis was always mad keen on machines and clockwork and stuff back in the day. I thought he’d be keen on cars and the like and used to imagine he’d spend his days tinkering with the things if he lived earthside now, but nope! He doesn’t care for ’em at all and I’ve never seen a motor vehicle in our part of Spirit. Bicycles and tricycles are as high-tech as travel gets. :)

I’m a rather small person, so I think they’re not that big. And they’re all ladies. But male rats can grow quite big. :) I did not have males so far, though, just saw some at the animal shelter.

And I just ordered a whole bunch of cat toys. We’ll see how long they’ll last this time, but it will make for good videos and tons of fun times for Mint.

I’m taking as much videos and pictures of my little ones as I can lately, because I think I’ll lose my first three rat ladies (rat grannies by now) soon. I just want to capture all the nice moments, so I won’t forget what they were like. They all have their little individual quirks after all.

I saw a (german) article lately complaining that horse riding has become a girl sport and all about caring for the cutie animals instead (because teenage girls need to channel their romantic feelings and care-instinct into something, also they will quickly lose interest in horses after their teens) of being competitive and about using the horse to get achievements, and therefore boys are not interested in it anymore and we need to change the cuddly additude towards horses to include boys again (read: turn it back into a male space).

I really, really hate this often-brought-up theory.
1. Seriously, have you ever been to a stable? Ever hung out with teenage girls who do much horse-riding? It’s a fairly macho environment (despite being totally female-dominated) where it’s constantly stressed that you must show the horse “who’s in charge”, never show fear because fear fucks up everything when you handle big strong animals, and never complain or show pain despite the fact that you’re bound to be squeezed/pushed/kicked/stepped on/bitten/thrown off now and again etc.
2. It’s just a small minority of teenage girls who’re into horses. I guess most teenage girls somehow do without this stage in their romantic development? Almost as if “being into horses” isn’t a stage in romantic development at all…
3. Some girls who’re previously into horses lose interest in them when they become more interested in partying and romande, just as some teenage boys who’re into some kind of sport or hobby lose interest in that eventually when they start spending more time going to parties and romance. In my experience though, most teenage girls give up on horses because they’ve become old enough that they’re asked to support themselves rather than relying on parents, and horses is an expensive hobby. Meaning it’s common to do horse-riding when in high school, not do so during your university years and the beginning of your career when you’re short of money, and then start doing so again when you eventually have a higher salary. How does that square with the “romantic development” theory? Answer: It doesn’t.

My friend is super into horses.
She’s damn tough too. It’s really not a “girly sport” where you train the horse like you’d train a bunny(not that there aren’t bunny sports, im talking like the “roll over fluffy!… Good boy!” kind of training). He got kicked by a horse and flew like 6 feet back, since she’s so small. She was perfectly fine and didn’t whine though it was painful and broke a rib. It would have done more damage, but since she’s so small it just made her fly back far.

Wow, Katzentier,your family would hate me, LOL! Also, from another non native English speaker, this is probably one of the most forgiving places to post. I’ve stumbled with language a LOT and everyone here was very kind in bringing it up and explaining the issue. I’ve learned so much here about so many topics, especially language.

It’s sort of funny when you think about it that people in different parts of the world haven’t merely come up with different ways to arrange the sounds, but to some extent different sounds too.

Lots of different ways. Russian has a lot of sounds other Indo-European languages don’t (the soft L, in particular, though the soft R too is strange, not to mention the regular letters

Ц(ts) Ч(ch) Щ(shch) Ж(zh) Ы(no good approximation, sort of like a weak glottal stop, turning into a strangled ee) Ю(yoo, but deeper in mouth, up near the soft palate) Е(ye, with a moderatly nasal note)) З(ye, but moving from the rear back, to the middle, up in the mouth) Ё(yo-e, always stressed, and hard to explain).

Klingon has no, “K”, it’s actually a “tl” sound. But since English doesn’t have that sound, the easy way to make it for the English speaker is to substitute a “K”.

Which is what people do when they don’t have a mental map for a sound, they make the closest approximation. English speakers have the handicap of very muddy vowels, so that the “purer” vowel sounds (i.e. more cleanly separated, varied) are harder for them to pronounce. Five of the 9 sounds I marked in Russian are vowels; though one of them is, officially, a consonant, because if it’s a vowel the rules fall apart).

sj/sk/sch-sound (i e the same one as in the beginning of Juan)

I am so confused. To me (as one who grew up from the age of 8 on in a an area with a large (in places where I was, often predominantly) Spanish speakers, Juan, and any flavor of, S don’t sound anything alike.

Juan is an aspirate H, high and back in the throat; made by forming the mouth as one would a “U” and giving it a minor sibilance; by moving from an “H” sound into the vowel.

No. American English says it correctly, for American English. Apart from (nominally) France, there is no, “right way” to say things (though there are “wrong” ways: i.e. you can’t be understood).

It’s one of my peeves. The idea that one English is better/more correct than the others is invidious. It’s why people in the states tend to think of Southerners as stupid, and how American Black English gets treated as a straight up sign of ignorance/stupidity/laziness.

It not only gets used as an external tool of classism (and racism), but the idea causes internal sense of self-worth to be diminished.

And looking to the English as the arbiter of right? They have a strange idea of how things ought to be. At the Congress of Vienna, they had a secret language they could use to discuss things in meetings: Latin. They were infamous for how badly they pronounced it, as early as the 16th Century. By the end of the 18th they had so drifted the way they spoke it no one else could understand them when they spoke it (one of the official languages of the Congress was, you guessed it, Latin)*.

Dialect is local (and indiosyncratic: And Pittsburghese grammar took me a while to get down (to be verbs are optional, among other oddities) — the 29g tank needs cleaned. Which’d really be “the 29 needs cleaned” among Pittsburgh aquarists. ‘Nat or red up are even worse (“and that” and “ready up” respectively). It’s where I picked up things like “I’d’ve”

When my mother was at Duquesne she was at a party, one of the linguistics grad students said, “You’re from Cleveland, aren’t you, near The Lake, east side of town.”

She was (that’s the house we lived in when I was young. Been on that spot since it was moved, 12 miles, in 1896).

Because her idiolect was that localised. I’d’ve is in it, as are some other oddities which came from Eastern European/Irish, and (oddly enough) internal immigration through Pittsburgh, on the way to Cleveland. I’ll wager it was Czech, and other “Bohunks” [my grandmother’s family was from “Bohemia” because when they left Austro-Hungary it wasn’t Czechoslovakia yet… ah that stuffed cabbage] who caused the loose use of the helping verb, “to be” to drop from Pittsburgh English, because Slavic languages don’t use it).

Examples. In Manhattan, “Uptown” and “Downtown” are actually directions(NE/SW respectively, but treated as if they were N/S) directions, and everyone uses them. Oddly, E/W aren’t defined, that’s a generic, “crosstown”. In the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles), If one is going, “up” Ventura Blvd, one is heading West.

For some reason I am blessed with a decent ear, so I get taken for being a better speaker of languages than I am (because my pronunciation is clean, even if my grammar is a mess). This leads to people speaking way to quickly for me to keep up, which makes me feel stupid, and more hesitant.

But I also am cursed with a very plastic ear. Put me in a group with a bunch of accents and I (as with Dvärghundspossen) become, “foreign” to the point that everyone wonders where I am from. I have been asked, when I said, “the US”, “Where are your parents from; how old were you when they moved”.

It’s funny, in a painful sort of way.

*The English have some terribly parochial ideas about how things are pronounced. They do, in fact, say, “ju-wan”, just as they say, jag-ewe-ar. To go back to Latin, they say, per-see, for “per se”, and per qew-odd, for “per quod, etc.

An ex-girlfriend of mine was trying to cook for some friends in London, she was making spaghetti. She asked for the oregano (uh, reh, geh, no). They were baffled, the one got it, “Oh, you want the Or ree GAH no!

“It’s one of my peeves. The idea that one English is better/more correct than the others is invidious. It’s why people in the states tend to think of Southerners as stupid, and how American Black English gets treated as a straight up sign of ignorance/stupidity/laziness.

It not only gets used as an external tool of classism (and racism), but the idea causes internal sense of self-worth to be diminished.”

Point noted.

And Pittsburgh has your stuffed cabbage. I think the Jewish deli does it even. It also has Dusquene // Dew-cane (I have no idea)

Isn’t Juan one syllable a bit like if Obi Wan had a longer w? The way Xavier is said, sorta like that? (I had a Xavier in my Latin class one year, so that one I know how to say properly)

I am so confused. To me (as one who grew up from the age of 8 on in a an area with a large (in places where I was, often predominantly) Spanish speakers, Juan, and any flavor of, S don’t sound anything alike.

No, it doesn’t sound like S at all… neither do the sj/sk/sch spellings in Swedish.

This is a weird discussion to have in writing. I mean, unless we’d all know how to write phonetics properly, it’s just too difficult to describe how things sound.

Husband points out that the same sound in Swedish can be spelled, in addition to SJ SK and SCH, by the letter combinations TJ, SKJ and plain K as well. (K is usually pronounced the same as in English though.) And they all sound really similar to the J in Spanish Juan, but nothing at all like S…

And whether Juan is that sound, or h, is dialectal. I stand corrected! I always thought that “Huan” was just what people said when they couldn’t make the proper sound… you learn something new every day!

katzentier: I know how you feel. Exactly. I speak four languages, and I am always afraid to use them if there are native speakers about; not so much because they will think less of me, but because I will. I will be forced to face my failings, so unless I have to (e.g. when I am in France, or Russia, or dealing with deaf people) I will tend to avoid using it.

also they will quickly lose interest in horses after their teens)

Don’t tell that to my ex. Part of why we got on was that I knew I was only a little ahead of the horses in her affections. Taking care of them (we both did it) meant mucking stalls, repairing tack, tending to hooves, washing, grooming, medicating, and (when all was sorted out) four weighed feedings a day.

Then there’s the movig of hay (110lb bales), and the driving the truck (diesel, manual transmission) with a 5 horse trailer behind it, and the riding, training, etc.

Los Angeles is an interesting place to gain language. Not only was there Spanish (local, and imported) but there was also the odd bit of holdover from Quechua (the most obvious to most people being guacamole), so I knew people which names like Xochitl.

Learning Russian gave me both a larger set of phonemes to use, and a much greater awareness of how my mouth works. I have a much easier time making specific sounds than I used to.

Okay, I’ll make an attempt anyway at describing a SOUND in WRITING. The Swedish sound that’s spelled sj or sch or skj or sk is a sound you make sort of at the back of your throat… you sort of breath out, like you do when you say H, but you have, um, a more narrow throat I guess? Which is apparently a very tricky thing to do for people who aren’t used to it.

Pecunium, it’s really cool that you know so many languages. I just know Swedish and English. I studied French a lot in school, but I’ve forgotten almost all of it now, since I haven’t really used it since.

For some weird reason I dreamed the other night that my parents-in-law were South Korean immigrants (although Husband still looked his usual self, despite having Korean parents). They argued that I ought to learn how to speak Korean. For some reason they thought I should start learning the eating utensils. In my dream, the general name for eating utensil was “geber”. “Fork” was “gebo” and “knife” was “gedobebe”.
I doubt that’s actually what they’re called in Korean.

OMG… Korean is a bitch to learn. Gender divided (men and women use different words,and some different forms (as I understand it from talking shop in the mess), and worse, status divided, you use different grammatical forms speaking up, compared to speaking across/down .

Pecunium – I grew up bilingual, but sadly my mothers second husband had to be a dutchman. She could have picked a russian, frenchmen, spaniard… pretty much anything, but no, dutch it had to be. So my second language is basically useless in the world. *sigh*

I think I’m doing ok at english. I should be able to speak basic french, but no, can’t do it. I could understand it in text, but I could never follow the spoken word. The hearing disability might not help, but meh, the teachers didn’t do a great job either. I always felt sort of resentfull towards french/french classes. That’s stupid and by now I regret it, but I’m not motivated enough to learn it on my own.

I also have a very faded, passive understanding of latin and ancient greek (back from college). This helps with medical terminology, but meh.

I’d like to learn russian though, sometimes after my final nursing exams. Because right now my energy is drained.